


come, unsavory guide

by Ias



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-24 15:49:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17103488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ias/pseuds/Ias
Summary: “You’re awfully trusting, you know.”Eve’s fingers trace Villanelle’s bare stomach as she speaks. There are other scars there, old and new, but Eve always recognizes her own. A short little gash; a notch on the bedpost.





	come, unsavory guide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fjalamoth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fjalamoth/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, friend!

Eve always knows when Villanelle is here.

She knows it almost immediately, but not quite—not until after she’s crossed the threshold of her flat, flicked on the fluorescent lights, pulled the door closed behind her, and locked it. It’s only when the deadbolt slides into place with its smooth, well-oiled solemnity that the hairs on Eve’s nape begin to rise; that the faint whiff of that damnable perfume wafts up into her nose. Hard to tell which of the two sensations comes first. By now, they’re practically one and the same.

Eve shrugs her heavy coat off, hangs it on its peg. Tugs her hair out of its bun, tosses her keys on the kitchen table. On these nights, moving into her own apartment feels like stepping deeper into the den of some feral animal, possibly rabid. The lights are dim, watery. The corners of the kitchen remain dark, and now the smell not only of perfume, but of alcohol. The now-empty bottle of gin lying on its side on Eve’s table had been three-quarters full in the morning. Eve knows this because she had held it in one hand with her cup of coffee in the other twenty minutes before leaving for work, debating—and ultimately refraining. Now she picks it up, tips it upside down to shake it over her open mouth, and catches the last few drops on her tongue. _O true apothecary, thy drugs are quick._    

Flashbacks to her college Shakespeare elective are certainly something new; she never used to be this fucking pretentious. But a lot of things have changed since

She walks into her bedroom, crosses the floor in the dark, and turns on the lamp. Slumped in the chair by the open window, in black ill-fitting sweats, Villanelle squints against the light. The gun in her hand, propped on her knee as it is, remains trained steadily on Eve. She has no doubt Villanelle could have shot her in the dark, drunk, if she wanted to.  

Eve stares at her from across the room, the sound of a distant siren filtering in through the window.

“I threw up in your bathroom sink,” Villanelle says at last, her voice throaty and raw.

Eve stares at her, the silence long. “You’re cleaning it up in the morning,” is all she says at last, and there’s neither reproach nor absolution in her voice. After this long, the two of them are above either.

*

For months, there’d been no sign.

Eve had known better than to think she was dead. If Villanelle died—and there was a part of her that remained unable to think of that eventuality as a _when_ —it wouldn’t be bleeding out from a stomach wound in a Paris alley somewhere. If she died, it would be with style. Eve still liked to think that if Villanelle died, it would be at her hands; but that was a matter of sentimentality.

The thing was, there was no after. Things just ended after that. No more investigating; she’d salted and burned that earth even before the ill-planned and poorly-executed events in Villanelle’s apartment. No agency left would have her; she had to assume that being personally fired by Carolyn Martens had that effect on people. Eve had gone home to her husband and found that she didn’t have a husband to go home to. If she’d handled the sudden separation better, maybe things could have worked out. She hadn’t.

It was seven months after Paris, after a series of failed jobs and empty bottles and a steadily draining savings account, that Villanelle reappeared. Specifically, reappeared in Eve’s kitchen halfway through the pasta boiling, her lip split and swollen, a bruise already spreading its purple stain over her chin, in clothes so nondescript for a moment Eve almost didn’t recognize her—almost. There had been, of course, beneath the tang of sweat and the copper of blood, the smell of that familiar perfume.

Eve had set her kitchen tongs down on the counter and gotten herself ready to die. It was easier, actually, than she’d thought it would be; in a way she’d been doing it for months. Villanelle had no gun, no knife; with a faint thrill, Eve thought maybe she planned to kill her with her bare hands.

She hadn’t, though. And that was where things really went to shit.

*

Things hadn’t gone well for either of them, really. The story, or what little of it Eve knows now, had come out in bits and pieces forked over as begrudgingly. Villanelle had killed her new handler, and failed to kill her old. What happened after that was less clear, but evidently more damning; she’d been cut off, stranded, no money and no connections and nothing to do but run. And drink. Suddenly she was a dagger in a drawer full of kitchen knives.

Eve knew the feeling.

*

Villanelle stays in the chair, and Eve gets ready for bed. Swaying slightly, smelling of gin, her eyes puffy with drunkenness and lack of sleep. There is in fact a small amount of vomit in her bathroom sink, hastily scrubbed out. Eve brushes her teeth, spits a fleck of white into the mess, and closes the door on the sharp bile-smell behind her. Villanelle is sitting right where Eve left her, the gun still trained on Eve’s chest. When Eve climbs into bed and turns off the light, she swears she can see the barrel. A circle of solid darkness, like a blip on the eye.

She doesn’t bother inviting Villanelle to bed; later in the night she’s awakened by the shift of the mattress. Villanelle does not touch her; Eve knows better than to reach out. She can feel her breath, though, on the back of her neck; and Eve begins to drift off herself long before it begins to deepen and slow into sleep.

*

 

It had started with little things where they shouldn’t be. Items that did not belong to Eve, colonizing her house. A pair of muddy boots shoved in the back of her closet. A bottle of cheap liquor in the cabinet where Eve keeps her coffee. What infuriates her is the carelessness of it; how her uninvited visitor has made no effort at all to learn the specificities of Eve’s life.

After that, it was things going missing. Food, mostly. A tupperware of perogies half as full as it used to be. An entire carton of juice sucked down in the period that Eve was out of the house.

Eventually it reaches a breaking point; and the breaking point is Eve storming into her bedroom where Villanelle is cleaning her guns, the parts neatly haloed around her like shrapnel frozen still. Villanelle looks up at Eve from her own bedroom floor, looks bored, looks unimpressed. Whenever Eve wants to throw her out on the street it’s just to see whether that expression would even change.

She brandishes a Chinese takeout box, devoured without her knowledge and then placed back in the fridge wholly empty for some poor stupid asshole to look forward to for dinner. Not out of cruelty. Just pure apathy. That was what really pissed Eve off.

“If you’re going to eat my food,” Eve snaps, “you’d better start bringing some goddamn groceries back with you.”

Villanelle stares up at her, all wide eyes and mockery. “Okay,” she says, the word like popped bubblegum—and she goes back to cleaning her guns as if Eve is the intruder here.

The thing is, Eve doesn’t actually expect her to _do_ it. But after Villanelle disappears for a couple weeks only to materialize in Eve’s armchair with a smear of someone else’s blood on her neck, there’s also a pack of ground beef in the fridge and a couple potatoes in the pantry.

Eve makes shepherd’s pie. It seems appropriate.

*

In the morning Eve watches her apply her perfume; the same bottle that had showed up in Eve’s luggage in another lifetime. She sits on the floor, the bottle before her, and carefully screws the cap off. There hasn’t been enough of it to spray in weeks. Instead she drags the wand along the inside of the bottle, catching the film still clinging to its interior; this done, she dabs it over the pulse points of her neck as lightly as the flick of a snake’s tongue.

When the bottle is empty Eve has no difficulty imagining Villanelle cracking it open, her fingers careful along the razor edges of broken glass, dragging them lightly over her skin to impart the last of their scent.

Villanelle is not very good at being broke. Eve likes to think that she’s better at it, but maybe that’s not a fair comparison. After all, the greatest heights of Eve’s past wealth could be described as “moderately comfortable.” Villanelle had

Eve still has the dress, though—the first and only Villanelle had ever given her. She puts it on sometimes. It almost always ends with Villanelle shoving her into her own mattress and fucking her mercilessly, with a kind of ravening hunger. Eve keeps telling herself she’s going to get rid of it, but God, if there’s one thing this entire fucked-up situation has proven, it’s that she’s the absolute _worst_ at denying herself anything.

*

“How does it make you feel,” Villanelle asks her one night, so close the whisper of her breath moved over Eve’s lips, “to know what you tried to do to me?”

Eve thinks about it. About the way the knife had slid into her like a key into a lock, only it had unlocked something inside of Eve herself.

“It makes me feel like I should have aimed for the heart,” Eve says, and Villanelle grins against her mouth like a shark.

*

Villanelle comes, Villanelle goes. She’s gone for days, weeks, one time a month and a half; “Like a cat,” Eve had said, when they were a tangle of sweaty limbs on the first night after. “You only ever show up when you need food or attention—”

And then Villanelle had bitten her, hard. Eve swore and shoved her away, only to pull her closer a moment later and wait for her to do it again.

Lately, the absences had been shorter. Lately, Villanelle had been sticking around.

 

*

“You’re awfully trusting, you know.”

Eve’s fingers trace Villanelle’s bare stomach as she speaks. There are other scars there, old and new, but Eve always recognizes her own. A short little gash; a notch on the bedpost.

Villanelle stares at her with those wide eyes that cant so easily towards innocence. They’re devoid of any emotion at all, now; the face that Eve has come to recognize as Villanelle’s own.

“Maybe I trust that you couldn’t hurt me if you tried.”

The scar beneath Eve’s fingers is both confirmation and refutation. Eve knows it hurt. She felt the knife go in, the resistance of skin parting, the gush of warmth over her hand and the shock, the _pain_ , in Villanelle’s face. The thought of it now still makes Eve want to take Villanelle’s hand and guide it between her legs. For now, her fingers circle Villanelle’s scar, before slowly traveling the skin between her breasts, lingering at her neck. “I could be in deep cover. This could all be a part of it.” Eve’s fingers trace the curve of her lips, and linger there. “Don’t you ever worry that I’m still trying to take you down?”

“Don’t you ever worry that I’m still going to kill you?”

Villanelle’s lips move beneath Eve’s fingers; she can feel every petulant syllable. When Eve says nothing, they reshapes into a kiss pressed to her fingers. Neither of them need an answer.

Eve’s fingers slide lower, lingering on the scar once more, and then dipping past it; as she slips her fingers between Villanelle’s legs, she finds her as hot and wet as blood.


End file.
